Where can I find a functional nslookup?

[Andy Blanchard]

On 12 February 2011 21:19, Bill Davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com> wrote:

> While I appreciate people taking time to provide pointers to other tools,
> that
> really wasn't the question... I don't want to retrain a bunch of people in
> a
> mixed AIX/Linux environment, nor give them the impression that Linux tools
> are
> inferior (although in this case they are).
>
> I don't know where the AIX version came from, I'll look to BSD for a
> solution.
> Having used real nslookup on AIX for a decade or so, I'd rather have it
> just for
> me, even if it didn't skip a training/perceptual problem.
>
> These folks use "ls" and "hinfo" for many things, their internal
> nameservers
> provide it, I suspect their scripts expect it to work, and see no reason
> for the
> Linux version to be a capon. Violates Plauger's Law of Least Astonishment.
>

There seems to be a little confusion in both the understanding of the
original question, the responses to it, plus perhaps some clarity on the way
forward is required.

"nslookup" was, and is, produced by ISC who also produce BIND (named).  It
has now been deprecated for some time and further development by ISC has
ceased - "dig" and "hosts" are the tools to use going forwards.  Most (all?)
current Linux and BSD distributions have already reflected this, other OS's
such as MS Windows and, apparently, AIX have yet to do so.  There is also
the possibility that AIX, like Microsoft Windows, has a customised/extended
(and therefore proprietary) implementation of the ISC version of "nslookup".

Bill, I think you need to take a step back from the immediate problem and
think about the long term.  It's never fun when a tool we use is EoL'd, but
unless you plan on sticking with AIX and trust that it will continue to
support their version of "nslookup", you may have some tough decisions to
make.  If you can't find a suitable version of "nslookup" for Linux, then
you may need to look at going the other way; getting "dig" and "hosts" onto
your AIX boxes and starting to migrate your scripts over to the new tools.

Unfortunately, "dig" has a syntax that can be considerably more convoluted
than the equivalent in "nslookup".  It is however worth the effort to learn
the new way as the output from "dig" is generally much better suited to
troubleshooting problems with DNS than "nslookup" ever was.

Regards,

-- 
Andy

The only person to have all his work done by Friday was Robinson Crusoe
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